Again the curtain falls on tragedy and rises on comedy. Twelve years later Tower Green was given over to revelry; and laughter, singing, and mumming were revived under the walls of the White Tower. A writer of the time speaks of the “marvellous cunning pageants,” and the “fountains running with wine” as Henry brought hither his new Queen, Anne Boleyn, for whom, on her entry “there was such a pele of gonnes as hath not byn herde lyke a great while before.” Once more, also, there was made procession, in state, but with scant applause of the people this time, from Tower Hill to Westminster. Soon the shadows return, and the “gonnes” and the music cease. Three short years pass and Anne Boleyn comes back to the Tower in sadness and in silence. On the spot where Buckingham suffered, her head, on May 19, 1536, was severed from her body. Three days afterwards Henry had married Jane Seymour.
During the short life of Anne Boleyn as Queen, Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More had come to the scaffold. Their imprisonment and death are dealt with in the next chapter. The “Pilgrimage of Grace,” a religious rising in the North, mostly within the borders of Yorkshire, to protest against the spoliation of the monasteries and the threatened attack on the parish churches, caused many a leader to be confined within the Tower. Its dungeons were filled with prisoners.
The magnificent Abbeys of Rievaulx, Fountains, and Jervaulx, in the Yorkshire dales, were pulled down, and to this day their noble ruins cry shame upon the despoilers. To the Tower came the Abbots of Jervaulx and Fountains, with the Prior of Bridlington, and they were hanged, eventually, at Tyburn Tree. Other prisoners were Lords Hussey and Darcey; the first was beheaded in Lincoln, the other on Tower Hill. With them were brought Sir Robert Constable, Sir John and Lady Bulmer, Sir Thomas Percy, Sir Francis Bigod, Sir Stephen Hamilton, Robert Aske, William, son of Lord Lumley, and many a one of Yorkshire birth whose names have not come down to us. All were put to death, without mercy, in 1537.